Camille Paglia Quotes

With 'Mad Men,' people who grew up or were living in that time, they love to talk about what it was really like.

When we think about the past, we think, 'It must have been so boring.' It's actually not.

Eighty per cent of my output is 'Mallory clowns on the Western canon,' and I'm happy to be that person.

I must admit that i am fascinated by the glories of ancient India. But when will the purveyors of Indian culture realise that not everything about our past was glorious?

I'm finally watching 'Mad Men.' As a child of the '60s, I can't believe how old everything looks! I am the age of baby Eugene.

'Downton Abbey' didn't have the impact it had just because it was a good story about people. It was something about that period and that world that was fascinating to people on a level that wasn't just as an entertainment.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but of what men believe happened.

From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past.

I'd love to do something on 'Mad Men' and 'Boardwalk Empire.' I really like period stuff.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past

Anytime a movie or television show retreats into certain American pasts, I'm both annoyed and relieved.

When a lot of people watch these Victorian-era shows, they're in love with the costumes, the romance, the whole sweep of it all. But there is nothing nostalgic about 'The Knick' at all.

I'm always a little unnerved when I see a show that's set in the past that implies in any way that things were nicer then.

I remember when I first saw Whoopi Goldberg doing standup, and she was wearing a sheet on her head, basically pretending to be this little white girl with long luxurious blonde hair. Everyone can relate to that. It's an oral history of black women's lives through laughter.

I definitely have fun commenting on the real world and interpreting through the 'Dear White People' lens.

Hollywood versions of watershed moments in American history are generally high-minded shlock. 'JFK,' 'The People vs. Larry Flynt,' even 'Lincoln': all of these boast excellent performances in scripts that are ultimately very conventional, even conservative.

We tend to paint the past only in extremes, as having been either categorically better than the present or irredeemably bad.

Writing plays fast and loose with the past.

I think, in history, everything is about the remix.

The fashion industry is an immense cultural and social blight that only gets a free pass because its would-be detractors are scared it'll start criticising their haircut.

Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn't about, and I don't mean writing style, but cultural style.

There is a recurring temptation for any nation, and for any writer who operates within its field of force, to make an ornament of the past: to turn the losses to victories and to restate humiliations as triumphs.

That stupid postmodern emphasis on image over content has slammed us right into a dramaturgy that willfully leaves the audience behind and then resents the fact that they don't 'get it.'

Every film that is made about the past is always a reflection of the present.

It might be the history major in me, but I look to the past when I try to construct my fictional futures.